New Estimation Technique for Vehicle-Type-Specific Headway Distributions

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Recently, a new statistical procedure was developed that enables fast, accurate, and robust estimation of composite headway distributions, such as Branston’s generalized queueing model (GQM). Until now, the new procedure had only been applied to aggregate vehicular flow. In this paper, the estimation procedure is extended to headway observations segregated according to vehicle type and period of the day. Consequently, the parameters of a new mixed-vehicle-type headway distribution model based on Branston’s headway model can be estimated. Distinction of vehicle type and sample periods provides additional insight into the plausibility of the headway distributions and parameter values, as well as into the car-following behavior of the distinct vehicle classes varying across the different periods. The estimation procedure was applied to traffic data collected on a two-lane rural road in the Netherlands. Comparison of the estimated headway distributions with real-life data shows that headway distributions can be realistically replicated with the Pearson-III-based mixed-vehicle-type GQM. Inter-pretable differences between the morning, noon, and evening sample periods and between passenger cars, unarticulated trucks, and articulated trucks are found. In addition, passenger-car equivalents for both articulated trucks and unarticulated trucks were determined from the parameter estimates.